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Awaiting the new and undescribed, Spring is yawning to resume the warmth we love and the leftover etchings of winter. There’s been a slow melt of ice as it runs down our walks and alleys, then a freeze and a shroud of fog and mist before the sun finds its way creating shadows long forgotten. Yawning dispels carbon dioxide and envelops our body with oxygen as do those misty curtains and peeping solar rays during the long, slow stretch of tree limbs, tulip bulbs and crocus blooms.

The cardinal sings for a mate, robins appear as if magically painted on the lawn, goldfinches and chickadees join juncos and jays at the feeders. The long stretch of our mornings into elongated evenings enlivens the mind to find new edges in the garden or a marauding crack in the front walk and maybe a tilt to the eaves but not for disdain. As the sun arcs anew, mending becomes a hobby, not a chore.

The year begins as “the screaming of wild geese never heard, the thin note of a titmouse and his bold ignoring of the bystander, the fall of the flies that patter on the leaves like rain…” Living in Petoskey is magical. For thousands of years the Odawa, Ojibwa and others have called this place home, yet even today, “Each man that goes into the wood seems to be the first man that ever went into a wood.”

For us in Downtown Petoskey, the days grow longer and the peace more abundant, traipsing into a new pastoral reverence as if these streets have never been trod. From the surrounding hills, the forest yawns and we gather again to celebrate a vigorous “ethereal symphony and existence.”